Apologies, I meant niche gamer. As in gamers who are in the know about the industry, know what indie games are, what ports are, and so on. These would invariably be a subset of the hardcore gamers, or to use the more PC term lately, 'core' gamer - not necessarily the ones clocking 12 hours a day into CS or CoD, but the ones generally in the know of the industry.

As a core gamer, why would I want to invest in Ouya, Shield and Steambox when I have the big three consoles and a gaming PC?

I mean, I can see where they're coming from, but as someone who knows about indie games and is in the know about the gaming industry, I ask this same question about SmartTV's... those TV's that connect to the Internet and generally do stuff... like an Apple TV. What's the point when I have a PC? Would a gamer who already has a gaming level PC and has a tonne of games on Steam get Steambox? It's basically just going to be a standardised PC hardware platform in a fancy container and a controller with what will probably end up being a fairly inflated price tag compared to comparable PCs.

If it's for the people in the know, then the people in the know already have what they need to enjoy Steam. So then it has to be for the people not in the know and not generally good at setting up a PC both hardware and software wise... which means the big question is, how is Valve going to approach the marketing for this kind of a system to attract this audience? It may be a backlash against Microsoft and Windows 8, but they're also trying to get Steam games happening on Linux at the same time... so yeah, it's really unclear what they're doing with this, at least to me.